The Apocalypse is Over

Ah yes, that logic applies perfectly to a case of 'I can run Unreal 2, Deus Ex 2, NFSU 2 etc. just fine, as well as other GL ports of Doom but the Holy Grail of GZDoom fails to run with acceptable stability.'

Big bad ATI and their faulty drivers :P

Those engines are D3d engines afaik. (of course, I could be very wrong) D3d is ATI's forte, while they pretty much suck at OpenGL.

My last computer would hard-lock randomly when playing normal ZDoom. Only ZDoom, though! No other port would do it and I could play ZDoomGL just fine (not sure GZDoom existed yet). I don't remember having any problems with other games either.

All the signs pointed to a hardware error of some kind or an obscure software error (my bet is that VIA was at fault). Since I got a new machine I have never seen ZDoom hang that way...

kristus:
Pretty much every game is Direct3D these days. I can't think of another modern game besides Doom3 (and it's derivatives) that isn't. I wouldn't be surprised if Doom3 doesn't have the same problems on Belial's machine, since obviously ATI would get a lot of complaints if they can't run Doom3. GZDoom, though... Not so much.

@Nick Perrin: Those tiles on the floor, DRAW THEM or make some sort of note about them, going from the arrow pointing to a tile to the arrow pointing away from a tile, and ONLY the coloured tiles.

Because when you reach the church, you need to follow that path in order to not die instantly.

And of course, no, it's not a missing resource or anything, just John Smith (or Hobbs or whoever you are) couldn't see what was right in front of him. Sorry but, just blaming the author for apparently missing something out when it CLEARLY is not just annoys me.

Also, to anyone experiencing gamma issues, make sure that in GZDoom, go "Option --> Display Options --> OpenGL Options --> Sector Light Mode: Standard"

david_a said:

kristus:
Pretty much every game is Direct3D these days. I can't think of another modern game besides Doom3 (and it's derivatives) that isn't. I wouldn't be surprised if Doom3 doesn't have the same problems on Belial's machine, since obviously ATI would get a lot of complaints if they can't run Doom3. GZDoom, though... Not so much.

I'm well aware of that D3D is used a lot more than OpenGL for PC titles these days. Which I find strange, since OpenGL is available to a lot more different systems than D3D is.

kristus said:

Those engines are D3d engines afaik. (of course, I could be very wrong) D3d is ATI's forte, while they pretty much suck at OpenGL.

Unreal Engine 2 can be implemented to do both OpenGL and Direct3D. I don't pretend to know which one Belial is using, or even if OGL for those games (Unreal II, Deus Ex II) is available.

Enjay said:

There's a Doom mod I really quite like to play that I'd really have difficulty playing on a regular, old fashioned graphics card of the kind that I need to simply play Doom in software mode. What's it called again... I know, Doom64 Absolution TC. ;)

Absolution doesn't require a very recent video card though does it? Or maybe a specific brand of video card? I never remember the absolution team hearing about problems related to either of those things.

The more that gets added to Doom ports, the higher the spec of hardware needed to run said ports will be. That stands to reason and I don't see a particular difficulty with that.

Right, So we've gone from needing an 80386 class CPU and 4MB of RAM with vanilla (1993), to an 80486/DX33 and 8MB of RAM for Boom (1999) to needing a 500+Ghz (right scuba whatever) processor, and about 128MB RAM with a relatively recent (or at least non-ati) graphics card for GZDoom, or an 80486 and 16MB RAM for Eternity in DOS (couldn't get Windows specs, but I think you're smart enough to figure out that it isn't a massive leap in specs), or a Pentium II and 64MB of RAM for odamex.

Granted the much higher graphics requirements for GZDoom are attributed to the fact that it has an OpenGL renderer, but the rest of it...

It's even less of a valid criticism of the port in question if the error is, as it would seem in this case, due to faulty hardware or buggy drivers not complying with agreed standards.

laffo

Please, troll. I used those ports on my 900 Athlon for years with no issues.

Scuba Steve said:

Please, troll. I used those ports on my 900 Athlon for years with no issues.

By those ports you mean only gzdoom, and ok so I dropped the numbers on it a bit. Quit crying.

BoldEnglishman said:

@Nick Perrin: Those tiles on the floor, DRAW THEM or make some sort of note about them, going from the arrow pointing to a tile to the arrow pointing away from a tile, and ONLY the coloured tiles.

Because when you reach the church, you need to follow that path in order to not die instantly.

I went in the church LONG before that... although it would have helped, would have saved me from so many quicksaves and quickloads... I already have the skull of Thamuz, but with no idea where to go...

kristus said:

I'm well aware of that D3D is used a lot more than OpenGL for PC titles these days. Which I find strange, since OpenGL is available to a lot more different systems than D3D is.

That may be - but unfortunately ATI did their best with their drivers to make developers use D3D. GL rendering issues with Catalyst drivers are not a myth. For freeware like Doom ports this may be an annoyance - but for professionally developed game it can be a death blow.

John Smith said:

Absolution doesn't require a very recent video card though does it? Or maybe a specific brand of video card? I never remember the absolution team hearing about problems related to either of those things.

No, a Geforce 3 or 4 (or ATIs equivalent) should be enough. The levels are neither particularly complex nor otherwise demanding.

Right, So we've gone from needing an 80386 class CPU and 4MB of RAM with vanilla (1993), to an 80486/DX33 and 8MB of RAM for Boom (1999) to needing a 500+Ghz (right scuba whatever) processor, and about 128MB RAM with a relatively recent (or at least non-ati) graphics card for GZDoom, or an 80486 and 16MB RAM for Eternity in DOS (couldn't get Windows specs, but I think you're smart enough to figure out that it isn't a massive leap in specs), or a Pentium II and 64MB of RAM for odamex.

Tell me, why should the port developers be prohibited from adding stuff that requires more processing power than was available 14 years ago?

Granted the much higher graphics requirements for GZDoom are attributed to the fact that it has an OpenGL renderer, but the rest of it...

Hardware rendering has a high overhead and high memory requirements and thus cannot be compared to software renderers. Most of the memory is needed for textures, btw. They alone require more than 4 times as much memory than for any software renderer if you want full quality. If not, you can always reduce the color depth and reduce the memory footprint that way. But I can't reduce the requirements of the system to do hardware rendering in the first place.
And you don't need a recent graphics card. If you don't have the need to play KDiZD at > 50 fps a Geforce 3 will still do in most cases. That was the hardware on which the renderer was developed.


So why the seemingly high system requirements:

The answer: I need it to handle ZDoom's special effects! To do skyboxes, mirrors and some other things a stencil buffer is required. This, however, forces use of a 32 bit video mode along with rather high demands on the system to work well. For plain vanilla maps you can get away with much, much less.

Very very cool atmosphere. Design was top-notch, and the new stuff implemented rocked.

Gameplay sucked hardcore though.

Now mind you, I played this on skill level TWO, and i found these things drove me nuts. I'm not going to bitch about stupid things like 'where are all the keys' or 'i'm lost'. Granted, it took me an hour to play this because i kept getting lost, but that's not what pissed me off.

1) The pistol. It's weaker than the pitchfork, and for at least half of the game its all you have. Having the shotgun a little earlier in the game would have made things a little more fun. Having to slap ten cultists with a pistol isn't very fun when it takes six shots to kill one.

2) The church puzzle. It was very kind of you to provide any kind of hint whatsoever. I tried every possible path I could think of, and ended up noclipping onto the end square.

3) The severe lack of health--especially nearing the end. The end boss was literally impossible to kill without cheating.

5) Severe lack of ammo all around, actually. Especially when you go into the freakshow tent. I'm supposed to kill all these demons with a pitchfork and a few bullets? The end boss was literally impossible to kill without cheating.

4) The end boss. How the hell am I supposed to fell a super cyberdemon with seven napalm shots and a fucking PITCHFORK? Not to mention that all the ammo in the weapons shop is behind unbreakable glass. Its like you were taunting me or something. The end boss was literally impossible to kill without cheating.

4) The end boss. One minor graphical niggle. The end boss is a super cyberdemon. How does that match up with cultists, and the rest of the game? Its attacks and death was cool, but seriously. A cyberdemon. A doom monster in an otherwise Blood-themed game.

Bitching aside, everything else was awesome.

Also, that is the coolest palette I've seen yet, save for possibly RTC-3050 or Zen Dynamics.

Graf Zahl said:

Tell me, why should the port developers be prohibited from adding stuff that requires more processing power than was available 14 years ago?

Eternity's linked portals were available 14 years ago?

esselfortium said:

Eternity's linked portals were available 14 years ago?

No, but they are not that performance demanding.
Plus, I'd like to see how Eternity works on an old computer with a large modern map. I doubt it will be that enjoyable.

maybe because large modern maps weren't designed for the Doom engine in the first place?

rf` said:

5) Severe lack of ammo all around, actually. Especially when you go into the freakshow tent. I'm supposed to kill all these demons with a pitchfork and a few bullets? The end boss was literally impossible to kill without cheating.

Everyone complained about this, but I never have the problem. I went into the freakshow tent and blasted most of the enemies away with my shotgun, still having about 10-15 shells left, or I used the tommy gun and picked up the drum of ammo on the target practice thing. I also have a healthy amount of napalm shots. I never had issues with ammo except at the very beginning.

Granted, I still haven't beat it. If only I knew where the hell to go.

I could so make an argument right now that eternity is better than gzdoom because its comparable features are less demanding. But it doesn't seem like it would either be lulzy or ram in any home truths, so I won't bother.

John Smith said:

I could so make an argument right now that eternity is better than gzdoom because its comparable features are less demanding. But it doesn't seem like it would either be lulzy or ram in any home truths, so I won't bother.

You can't make an argument because Eternity has a software renderer, not a hardware renderer. I can't change the fact that just by initializing OpenGL several megabytes of memory get allocated by the system.

Starting ZDoom with Doom2.wad in 1280x1024 to the title screen causes allocation of 27 MB, including memory allocations by DLLs that are loaded.
Doing the same with GZDoom allocates 54 MB and the only GL resource that gets created by the game up to this point is the title picture. The rest is completely inside the system and not under application control.

EDIT: not even worth attempting to explain.

Graf Zahl said:

Starting ZDoom with Doom2.wad in 1280x1024 to the title screen causes allocation of 27 MB, including memory allocations by DLLs that are loaded.

And 268435456 bytes to run the actual game

Graf Zahl said:

That may be - but unfortunately ATI did their best with their drivers to make developers use D3D. GL rendering issues with Catalyst drivers are not a myth. For freeware like Doom ports this may be an annoyance - but for professionally developed game it can be a death blow.

Right, I suppose you're thinking about the ATI Rage Pro chips that I kept finding in all my friends brand computers during the late ninties. Those were lovely, would barely run anything harware rendered back then.

Kaiser said:

And 268435456 bytes to run the actual game

Care to explain how you managed to get this error? This sounds like the engine tries to load some corrupt data.

kristus said:

Right, I suppose you're thinking about the ATI Rage Pro chips that I kept finding in all my friends brand computers during the late ninties. Those were lovely, would barely run anything harware rendered back then.

No, I am talking about the drivers, not the chips. ATI's cards are not bad but the problems with their GL drivers are well documented. The D3D drivers are fine so anyone doing some serious development for games would have been ill advised to use OpenGL if they wanted their games to run on ATIs without expecting some problems. I can't say how well id managed to work around these driver bugs in Doom3, though.

Anyway, I do remember these ATI Rage Pro chips. They were an utter nightmare. Back then I was working for a company that was porting a Playstation game to the PC but of course the game had to run on everything in the market, even the low end crap hardware. The ATI Rage and Matrox Mystique were some of the worst offenders with their totally insufficient hardware rendering capabilities.

While we are on the topic of errors, here's what I get when I try to play this:

OS: Windows XP 5.1 (Build 2600)
Service Pack 2
M_LoadDefaults: Load system defaults.
W_Init: Init WADfiles.
adding D:/DOOMII/gzdoom.pk3
adding D:/DOOMII/doom2.wad (2919 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:colormap.wad (1 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:gldefs.wad (1 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:graphics.wad (20 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:map.wad (13 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:res_data.wad (2905 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:res_x2pistol.wad (15 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:sfx_fire.wad (76 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:sfx_gore.wad (62 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:sfx_thamuz.wad (28 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:sfx_torch.wad (42 lumps)
adding D:/DOOMII/tcotd2.pk3:skybox.wad (10 lumps)
I_Init: Setting up machine state.
CPU Speed: 2211.337003 MHz
CPU Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
Name: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+
Family 15 (15), Model 39, Stepping 1
Features: MMX MMX+ SSE SSE2 SSE3 3DNow! 3DNow!+
I_InitSound: Initializing FMOD
Setting DirectSound output succeeded
Setting driver 0 succeeded
Initialization succeeded
V_Init: allocate screen.
S_Init: Setting up sound.
ST_Init: Init startup screen.
P_Init: Checking cmd-line parameters...
G_ParseMapInfo: Load map definitions.

Execution could not continue.

Script error, "MAPINFO" line 8:
Bad syntax.

No idea as to what's causing it. I got the latest version of GZDoom.

No, you don't. That error is a clear indicator because the WAD uses a feature that is relatively new. To be precise, the keyword 'noinfighting' causes it.

Well that is the error that comes up when you don't have the latest version...

By the way, the three artifacts you need are an Hourglass of blah de blah, Skull of Thamuz and the Diamond.

If you REALLY want to know where they are...
1. The Diamond is in a safe and the safe key is in the Graveyard.
2. The Skull of Thamuz is in the Church but the Church requires the fire Key which is in the laboratory which can only be opened if you read the book inside the Hospital.
3. The Hourglass is in the alter-world which can be found in the Circus which needs the eye-key. I cannot for the life of me remember where it is though.

BoldEnglishman said:

By the way, the three artifacts you need are an Hourglass of blah de blah, Skull of Thamuz and the Diamond.

Hey! I have those three things already! But... where do I go and what do I do with them? That's where I'm stuck.

At a spot near where you found those hellhounds you'll see three floating exclamation points surrounding a red area and a covered pit. That's where they all go, although you may want to visit the weapons shop nearby and the now broken cages before you place the artifacts.

Ichor said:

At a spot near where you found those hellhounds you'll see three floating exclamation points surrounding a red area and a covered pit. That's where they all go, although you may want to visit the weapons shop nearby and the now broken cages before you place the artifacts.

Hmm. There were no exclamation marks above those blocks where you place the artifacts. Thus, there was a very low chance of having figured that out on my own except maybe by luck! Anyway, placed the artifacts, already had the guns and ammo, all I had to do was pump a few shots of napalm at our recoloured cybie friend and it was over, I still had tons of ammo left. Meh to that boss and ending.

Good stuff though, I clearly enjoyed this map otherwise I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to figure it out! Great design but really - things need to be clearer about your progression.

Nick Perrin said:

Hmm. There were no exclamation marks above those blocks where you place the artifacts. Thus, there was a very low chance of having figured that out on my own except maybe by luck!

These weren't there?

IIRC; you need to find the eye key, go into the "brain storage" (on the way to the carnival) and there read a note about some books in the house with the dagger-door (outside the town). After that go there and you'll find a translation book.
This book is required to read another book you can find behind a moon door, wich is located in an underground passage you reach from the hospital. Once you've "translated" the book, the exclamation marks above these platforms appear!

Unfortunately, as you've already discoverd, you can skip that whole part and just place the artifacts.
I consider this being a bug, but it seems Torm isn't going to release another version...

Vader said:

This book is required to read another book you can find behind a moon door, wich is located in an underground passage you reach from the hospital. Once you've "translated" the book, the exclamation marks above these platforms appear!

Aah of course! I never found the translation book. Just realized I never went into the dagger door house either. Never got the dagger key....